Revision as of 13:10, June 25, 2014

The Squid Proxy Server

This is a quick and dirty howto about getting Squid up und running in 5min...

What benefits one may get from using an anonymous proxy server? Well, I would say many things but the most important one is that you can browse the web anonymously without exposing your IP, location etc.. out there. Anyhow, even though I usually use OpenVPN or PPTP for safe browsing and such things, having a private anonymous proxy server in your toolbox is a nice thing.
Furthermore, a cache is speeding up you daily internet connection with repeating objects getting out of the cache instead of downloading it again. Advanced filtering technics (Antivirus, Content, Ad-Blocks, etc) are also possible.

Once it got installed, since this squid proxy setup will be using authentication to authenticate users via the ‘ncsa_auth‘ helper, we need to know the location of this helper so we can use it in our squid.confconfiguration file. To find this I’ll be using a tool named as ‘qfile‘ which is shipped in ‘app-portage/portage-utils‘.

qfile ncsa_auth

net-proxy/squid (/usr/libexec/squid/ncsa_auth)

ok, so the auth helper is located in ‘/usr/libexec/squid/ncsa_auth’ so let’s setup Squid’s configuration file (/etc/squid/squid.conf). Make sure you change ‘XXX.XX.XX.XXX’ with your actual server’s IP address and edit anything else you want to suit your needs.